Massacres in Texas and Ohio, a Greenland land grab and a Sharpie-altered weather map

Donald Trump’s racist attack on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley was followed on 3 August 2019 by two horrific mass shootings in the space of 24 hours, the latest reminder that his rhetoric could have tragic consequences.

In El Paso, Texas, 21-year-old gunman Patrick Crusius marched into a Walmart, largely frequented by Hispanic customers, at 10.40am and shot dead 23 people, injuring as many more.

Crusius was later found to have posted a white nationalist manifesto on 8chan warning of “the Great Replacement” and echoing language used by the president, notably regarding the country facing an “invasion” by Latino migrants.

#WhiteSupremacistInChief duly trended on Twitter.

Less than 24 hours after Crusius’s attack, Connor Betts, 24, opened fire on Saturday night revellers in Dayton, Ohio, killing nine and injuring 17.

Trump visited both cities the following Wednesday on a “healing” mission that did not go at all well.

The president had already confused Dayton with Toledo in a press conference denouncing the “barbaric slaughter” and blaming the twin tragedies on “the glorification of violence” by “gruesome and grisly video games” rather than the ready availability of lethal firepower in stores nationwide.

Nevertheless met graciously by city mayor Nan Whaley and local Democratic senator Sherrod Brown, the president visited survivors at the Miami Valley Hospital, posing for selfies during a tour carefully stage-managed by aides.

Afterwards, however, Whaley and Brown told reporters they had attempted to pin Trump down on a promise to pressure the Senate majority leader into action on gun control but he had simply shrugged them off with vague and non-committal murmurs.

“We can't get anything done in the Senate because Mitch McConnell and the president of the United States are in bed with the gun lobby,” Brown said.

Trump blew up at that, accusing the pair of “lying” and “misrepresenting” his efforts before spewing out further Twitter attacks against his constellation of media enemies from his seat aboard Air Force One en route to El Paso.

Mayor Whaley dismissed his bile, telling The Cincinnati Enquirer, astutely, that the  president “lives in a world of Twitter”, later calling him “a bully and a coward” on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show.

Touching down in El Paso – where Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke had already demonstrated real community leadership on the ground – a presumably still fuming Trump could not help but recollect his rally success the last time he was in town.

“We could have sold it out four times,” he beamed, thinking of the local arena, to which his campaign still owed $500,000 in unpaid fees.

The blunder was reminiscent of his notorious remark on 11 September 2001, when New York’s most famous son told an interviewer he now had the tallest building in Manhattan after the Twin Towers were brought down by al-Qaeda.

Incredibly, he and Melania also found time during a hospital visit with the wounded to pose for a photo with a baby whose parents had been murdered by Crusius, a broad grin slapped across his face as he failed to consider the context and gave a thumbs up.

"Go home. You are NOT welcome here!" read signs held up by protesters. He did.

More PR disasters were to follow as the silly season took hold.

Trump was laughed at by the international media on 9 August for announcing that Kim Jong-un had sent him “a very beautiful letter” – having previously told a West Virginia crowd that the pair “fell in love” after the initial tough talk – given that Kim had continued testing long-range missiles behind his back since their last meeting.

By 18 August, Trump found himself in an episode of Borgen when he expressed interest in buying the semi-autonomous Arctic island of Greenland from Denmark on behalf of the US.

Hoping to ape Thomas Jefferson with a Louisiana Purchase of his own, the president joked about the speculation and even tweeted a picture of Trump Tower crash-landed on its barren rocks like a garish alien mothership.

But Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen was not amused, dismissing the matter as an “absurd discussion” and saying the territory was not for sale.

Affronted, Trump scrapped an upcoming trip to Copenhagen and called her “nasty” (as so many women are, in his eyes), this in the same south lawn press session in which he attacked Jews who voted Democrat and looked to the clouds and pronounced himself “the Chosen One” – like David Moyes – for starting his unwinnable trade crusade against China.

The president ended the summer with a truly outstanding run on Twitter, angrily denying Florida newspaper reports that his Miami Doral golf resort was riddled with bed bugs on 27 August and tweeting out a high-resolution aerial image of a smouldering launch pad at Iran’s Imam Khomeini Space Center following an explosion, which had been captured by a US surveillance satellite, given to him in a classified briefing and was very much not intended for public consumption.

In September, Trump dodged a trip to Poland to commemorate the start of the Second World War so as to hit the golf course (Mike Pence went instead).

Tweeting from the links, the president warned citizens of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama to stay safe as the category-5 Hurricane Dorian bore down on the southeastern seaboard from the Atlantic.

The only trouble was, there was no question of the storm coming as far inland as Alabama, prompting the National Weather Center in Birmingham to issue a correction to avert mass panic.

What followed was a full week of Trump refusing to admit his error and his goblin-like commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, threatening to fire the weathermen for contradicting the president – even though he had been dead wrong.

A crescendo of ludicrousness was achieved when the president presented a weather map of his own from the Oval Office that he appeared to have doctored to loop in Alabama, a lie carried out with his trusty black felt Sharpie, the smoking marker pen clearly still visible on the Resolute Desk as he talked to reporters.

As if that was not enough, Trump found time in the middle of the Dorian disaster to pick a fight with Will and Grace actress Debra Messing for proposing a backlist of Trump-supporting entertainment industry personalities.

“Will Fake News NBC allow a McCarthy style Racist to continue?” he wondered aloud as even the sitcom actress herself fretted that this might not be the best use of the leader of the free world’s time during an emergency.

This was only the latest absurd celebrity feud from the president, who had begun the year accusing Spike Lee of carrying out “a racist hit” by criticising him at the Oscars, branded Bette Midler “a washed up psycho” in June and went on to lay into "boring musician John Legend and his filthy mouthed wife [Chrissy Teigen]".

All unquestionably Hall of Famers but none quite so perversely iconic as his rejection of Meryl Streep as “one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood” and “a Hillary flunky who lost big” after the January 2017 Golden Globes.

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